Sony and the fall of the PSP

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Joel at BBG writes a stirring piece on the PSP and its promise. I remember Joel IMing me back in 2005 while he was standing in the hot sun in line at E3 to see Sony’s vaunted handheld – “Sony gave me cancer” – and how excited we all were when we first saw this bugger. Now, however, my PSP is basically a retro-gaming box with a wide range of potential piracy options and, most recently, I’ve played the DS more than Sony’s lumpen handheld.

He goes into the failures of the PSP – UMD, no keyboard, bad games – yet says that Sony can step it up and make it out the other end without losing face.

This isn’t out of reach for Sony. In fact it’s already in their blood—the company that makes the Vaio P isn’t afraid to try to make products that straddle category boundaries. (Nor are they afraid to charge twice as much as their competitors to do so.) But Sony, like so many other successful organizations, has become victim to their own illusions of their strengths, thinking they could grow only laterally. That may work with televisions and amplifiers, but it’s not going to cut it in the fight to become the one thing people keep in their pocket at all times.